Weapons of Mass Destruction

Weapons of Mass Destruction

So the Boston bomber is being charged with using a “weapon of mass destruction” to carry out an attack with the intent of murdering many people. I gather that the weapons of mass destruction charge carries a stiffer penalty than just any old weapon.  So, with that WMD, the bomber(s) managed to kill 3 people and maim near a couple of hundred folks who happened to be watching the marathon at its ending stage.  He may also be termed a “terrorist”. So, he will be a terrorist who employed a WMD to carry out an act of terror within the United States.  The good republican folk, always trying to be helpful, are also trying to have him declared an “enemy combatant”, the better to keep him incarcerated like those evil guys down in Gitmo, As an enemy combatant, I guess we can keep him in a cell for a really long time without all that inconvenience about his rights to a lawyer. The fact that he’s actually a US citizen seems less important to the republican folk than the fact that he hails from Chechnya and used a WMD.

So all this republican logic train started me thinking. This guy, the mad bomber terrorist dude actually succeeded in killing three people.  Meanwhile, the dude who used his automatic guns equipped with large capacity magazines in Newton, CT managed to off over twenty little kids in an elementary school.  And that dude who used his automatic rifles in that theatre in Aurora also killed  more innocents than our Chechnyan-Bostonian  terrorist. So what then makes a WMD? It seems to me logical that any weapon capable of causing the deaths of large numbers of people in a short period of time could logically be classified as a WMD. Certainly an IED with a large enough dynamite capacity would qualify, but so might an AR-15 rifle equipped with a high capacity magazine.  Nicht Wahr??

So, if we can all agree that our Chechnyan-Bostonian terrorist can be charged as a terrorist using a WMD, then why not the dudes who shot up Aurora and Newtown?  They were, after all, way more effective at killing a large number of people in a very short time period than our terrorist in Boston, n’est-ce pas??

If so, then it follows that any automatic or semi-automatic gun, equipped with a large capacity magazine, is by definition a WMD. And one might imagine that, say, background checks might be useful before granting permission to buy a WMD.  So, now perhaps we can move logically to some slightly more serious control over such weapons. Surely, even republicans currently in the loving arms of the NRA money-bags would agree to such a proposition.

It also makes me wonder, just hypothetically of course, whether under-regulation of dangerous industries, might also be the equivalent to a WMD. That explosion in West Texas seems to have been caused by really crappy management oversight of the plant and little to no federal or state regulation/oversight.  Makes me wonder . . .

And in other news, it is reported that on exoplanet Dickhead, the Cock brothers now wish to emulate their mentor Sir Rupert of Murdoch by buying their very own newspaper. They are simply trying, they claim, to provide an outlet for conservative viewpoints, otherwise missing in these here United States.  I suppose technically they have a point since all of Rupert’s outlets, The Faux News Network, the False Street Journal and others no longer qualify as actual news outlets.